Lenovo K8 Plus Review: Compact, yet loaded

After launching the K8 Note, Lenovo recently added a new smartphone, called the K8 Plus in its K8 series. The smartphone seems similar to the K8 Note with features like dual cameras and a powerful battery, but it offers them at an affordable price. The Lenovo K8 Plus’ price starts at 10,999 INR. The specs seem quite impressive, but verdict the same in real-life usage as well? Let’s check out in this review and see if it’s the smartphone that you be buying.

Design and Build

The design of the Lenovo K8 Plus is almost like the K8 Note but the size is a bit smaller as the display panel is 5.2-inches only. Similar to its sibling, the body is made up of anodized aluminum. The edges are slightly curvy and it also gives a good grip. The size seems good to be used with a single hand. The rear panel has Dual camera and flash followed by the fingerprint sensor, situated just below the antenna lines.

The front panel has the secondary camera and sensors on the top, and three LED backlit keys just below the display. The micro-USB charging port in at the bottom side of the edge along with the speaker grill. The 3.5mm AUX cable is on the top, Volume rocker keys and Power button is on the right while the SIM card tray is stapled on the left side of the edge. The special Music Key is on the right side. Overall, the design is pretty basic and durable.

Display

The Lenovo K8 Plus features a 5.2-inch display with a resolution of 1,920 x 1,080 pixels and a 2.5D scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass on top. The display is colourful, crisp and elegant. One can see the display screen with different viewing angles, and the sunlight readability is also very good.

Specifications

It houses an octa-core MediaTek Helio P25 processor clocked at 2.5GHz with 3GB of RAM. There is 32GB of onboard storage and it can be expanded up to 128GB via microSD. It runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat out of the box. Surprisingly it also has stock Android just like the previous K8 Note. There are no additional apps or customisations, which is quite good.

Performance

The Lenovo K8 Plus performs very well is all the aspects. The touch response is fast and has good multitasking ability which allows switching between apps smoothly. The gaming performance is good too. I played Asphalt 8 and Modern Combat 5 and there was no lag in the gameplay. However, it heats up the smartphone.

The benchmark performance of the smartphone is good. It scores 65646 in AnTuTu, 48741 in Quadrant Standard and Geekbench Mark is 3536 for multi core, 810 for single core.

The fingerprint sensor unlocks the smartphone quickly. The 4G VoLTE also works very well and the connectivity was quite good. The Dolby ATMOS feature works fine and enhances the audio quality. The dedicated music key becomes handy to use for controlling the music.

Camera

The dual camera setup of 13MP + 5MP shooters with PDAF and flash works well and shoots amazing photos. The daylight experience is pretty good. All the clicked photos captures a good amount of details and colour contrast. The portrait mode also gives great results. The low light performance is good but not the best.

The front camera is of 8MP and has a selfie flash. The camera works fine in daylight and in the night, the selfie light aka screen flash helps to capture good images.

Battery

The 4000mAh battery is a beast and offers whole day battery backup with moderate usage. The standby time is of more than three days. Minimal users will get more than two days of battery life. The only drawback is that it doesn’t have fast charging which takes the battery considerably long time to charge completely.

Verdict

The Lenovo K8 Plus is a very good smartphone to pick if you want to spend around 10K. It covers every aspect of need like battery, camera, and performance. The only drawbacks are the lack of fast charging and no Type-C port. While there’s strong competition in the form of the Xiaomi Redmi Note 4, the K8 Plus stands out because of its compact size and dual cameras.